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to have the Marines be very sure that the ship we choose is clean of weapons, though. We can’t afford to leave any guards behind, and I don’t want tocome back and find any . . . surprises.”

Gray closed his eyes and opened a channel to Mackey, letting him know what he wanted. Mackey acknowledged; the Russian destroyerSlava had not yet rejoined the Moskva and was adrift a few kilometers off. She would do . . .

“Okay,” he said, returning to the mess hall. “I need your assessments. Where are the Sh’daar refugees, and how are we goingto make contact?”

“Out there, of course,” Truitt said, with a vague wave of his hand toward the panorama of deep space. “Where would you expect?”

Gray eyed the head of America’s xenosophontology department and frowned. “I’d hoped for something more substantial from you, Doctor. More useful.”

“Well, they can’t have gone far, right?” Kline said. “Last time we saw them, they were traveling in normal space.”

“A lot of them were,” Mallory replied. “The big, mobile colonies, the McKendree cylinders, the Banks orbitals. Big things,too big to go fast, too big to fit through a TRGA.”

“Well, then,” Truitt said. “Seems to me they can’t have gone farther than three light years, right?”

Gray looked up at the overhead. “Dr. Truitt . . . do you have any idea at all how big a light year is?”

“Certainly. A little over nine trillion kilometers.”

“And how tiny any vessel or artifact fashioned by intelligence actually is within all of that emptiness? We would have troublespotting a planet within a light year or three. Even something as big as a Banks orbital would be all but lost in all that emptiness.”

“Surely,” Kline said, “there must be some way of finding a whole fleet of such structures.”

“We’ll search,” Gray said. “Maybe we’ll pick up radio chatter or the beams of laser coms. Maybe we can pick them up on infraredor by X-ray trails. A structure that big plowing through dust and gas at close to c should leave a pretty bright radiation track. But it’s not going to be easy. These guys don’t want to be found, remember.They’re afraid of the Consciousness chasing after them, and they know that thing is a hell of a lot more technologically advancedthan we are.”

“If it’s as big a problem as you suggest, Admiral,” Truitt said, thoughtful, “what do you suggest we do?”

“We might scout ahead looking for the smaller Sh’daar ships traveling faster than light—under their equivalent of Alcubierre Drive. Alcubierre Drive uses focused gravitational singularities to tuck the space around them into a bubble moving at FTL, and that generates some pretty significant gravitational waves.”

“Surely that’s how they’re moving their big world-ships as well,” Mallory said. “If we can pick up gravity waves . . .”

Gray shook his head. “The power usage for an Alcubierre Drive is many orders of magnitude greater at FTL velocities as opposedto sublight. We should be able to pick up FTL ships under drive with the equipment we have on board America. Structures moving at sublight . . . not so much. Again, we’ll look. But I want you to know we’re going to be searching aworld-sized haystack for a microscopic needle.”

“Do we at least know what direction they were headed?” Kline asked.

Gray grinned at her. “Sure!” He waved his arm. “That way! We know they’re headed for the galactic disk of the Milky Way. That’s an enormous area to search.”

Truitt scowled. “If their Alcubierre Drive is as good as ours . . .” he began.

“It’s at least as good,” Mallory pointed out.

“. . . then in three years they should have made it all the way from N’gai to the Milky Way’s disk. Ten thousand light years,you said?”

“About that,” Mallory agreed, nodding. “Of course, we’re pretty sure now that it was the Sh’daar who created the TRGAs inthe first place . . . their ur-Sh’daar ancestors, I should say. If they have any TRGAs set up along their line of flight,all bets are off.”

“Why is that?” Kline asked.

“Because TRGAs are gateways to multiple places across multiple times. A slight shift in your transit trajectory can drop youthousands of light years off course . . . and maybe put you in a completely different time period.”

“Yes,” Truitt said. “Passing through a TRGA is how we originally reached this epoch, over 800 million years in our past. I see your problem.”

“Our problem, Doctor,” Gray sighed. “To find these guys, we’re going to have to be incredibly lucky.”

Truitt looked glum for a moment, then brightened. “Well, we do have one ace in the hole.”

Gray looked at him, wondering what the doctor could possibly be thinking.

Chapter Eleven

18 April, 2429

Koenig Residence

Westerville, Ohio

1545 hours, EST

Koenig was watching the news feed on his living room wall. The anti-AI riots in D.C. had spread and were growing like somemonstrous, evil cancer. Troops had been brought in to restore order, and in some of the outlying sectors of the city, thefighting was house-to-house.

A talking head from a D.C. network station was describing the scene, with wrecked and burning vehicles behind her. Koenighad the house enhance the image; on a charred wall behind the reporter, he could just make out a scrawled piece of graffitiin bright scarlet—the words fight pAIn.

“You can see the logo of Fight pAIn behind me,” the reporter was saying. “Anti-AI elements have been growing stronger in severalcities, and Dr. Anton Michaels, from his home at Midway, has told us that these riots are the inevitable result of givingmore and more decision-making powers to our machines.”

The shot shifted to a view of Michaels, floating in partial microgravity, his pale halo of frizzy hair unkempt. He started speaking, but Koenig thoughtclicked the sound off. He had no desire to hear what that acid little Humankind Firster had to say about machines or anything else.

That pAIn meme, however, had been popping up with increasing frequency in riot-torn cities across the country of late . . .and it had all the hallmarks of being a particularly sneaky bit of memegineering. The question, of course, was who was behindit? The Russians? The Pan-Euros?

Or maybe it was a memegineering attack by a group—the Humankind